Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) painted a vision of an America in the hands of violent migrants during his speech at the Republican National Convention.
Cruz was one of several former presidential candidates to take the stage in Milwaukee on Tuesday night to speak to the theme of the RNC’s second day, “Make America Safe Once Again.” The senator attacked the surge of migrants attempting to cross the country’s southern border with Mexico and claimed that every day Americans were “dying, murdered, assaulted and raped” by “illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released.”
He claimed the Democratic Party had ignored the crisis at the border to garner “votes from illegals” instead of protecting kids — a baseless statement evoking related conspiracies about migrants overtaking the U.S.
“Today, as a result of Joe Biden’s presidency, your family is less safe, your children are less safe, the country is less safe,” Cruz declared. He pointed to the deaths of Laken Riley, Rachel Morin and Kathryn Steinle to bolster his claims.
“We can fix it, and when Donald Trump is president, we will fix it,” Cruz went on.
While the crimes cited by Cruz and other Republicans are real, the crux of their arguments — that immigration leads to increased crime — is not. Recent studies show little evidence that immigrants or migrants cause an uptick in crime.
In Cruz’s home state of Texas, undocumented immigrants were 26% less likely than native-born Americans to be convicted of homicide, according to the Cato Institute. Those numbers were even lower for immigrants with legal status,.
Cruz also pointed to figures from Customs and Border Protection that recorded more than 10 million migrant “encounters” since February 2021. But those totals count migrants who make repeated attempts to cross into the U.S. as separate “encounters,” and they don’t account for the millions of migrants that have been turned away or deported under the Biden administration’s rules.
Republicans voted to block a border security package earlier this year at the demand of former President Donald Trump, something Cruz also didn’t mention. The legislation would have given Biden emergency authority to restrict border crossings and allotted more funding for Border Patrol agents, among other measures. (Biden signed an executive order to crack down on migration in June anyways.)
Cruz is running for a third term in the Senate in November. He will face Democratic challenger Rep. Colin Allred.
